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toward him. It raised its blades in the same way he’d seen it do with Metzer.
    There was no escape. Hollis pulled the trigger.
    Nothing happened. The safety was on.
    Hollis’s own words were the last thing he heard as he fumbled for the gun’s safety switch. . . .
    “The beauty of it is: they can’t afford to let us fail. . . .”

Chapter 2: // Operation Exorcist
    Reuters.com
     
    High-profile Assassinations Stun Financial Community — Attacks that left scores of financial executives dead worldwide have rattled the reclusive billionaires’ club. Security services in the U.S. , Great Britain , Japan , and China have withheld details of sixty-one nearly simultaneous killings that appear to be part of a coordinated campaign reminiscent of last year’s spammer massacre .
    No one has claimed responsibility for the attacks. However, the murders highlight growing resentment over outsized executive compensation in the midst of skyrocketing unemployment .
     
     
    T he surveillance video showed a man screaming as a robotic motorcycle wielding twin swords chopped him to pieces.
    A voice spoke in the darkness. “Who was he?”
    “Anthony Hollis—ran a highly successful hedge fund.”
    “Has his name been in the news?”
    “Yes. Lots of detractors in the business press. Four hundred and six negative mentions in the past year alone.” A pause. “You think the Daemon botnet is behind this?”
    “Play it back. Slowly.”
    The video replayed in slow motion, frame by frame. A blade-covered motorcycle advanced on the cornered man. The image stopped then zoomed in. Though motion blurred, the screen was frozen in midstroke, a sword leveled at the man’s neck while spiraling lasers in the bike’s headlight assembly illuminated his terrified face.
    “Unmanned vehicle. Like some sort of ground level Predator drone. Daemon operatives call them ‘razorbacks.’ The same type Dr. Philips described in her report on the attack at Building Twenty-Nine.”
    “So the Daemon is conducting class warfare now?”
    “I don’t think so. These people were all engaged in a specific type of financial activity.”
    “Sobol did say his Daemon would ‘eliminate parasites in the system.’ Could it have viewed Hollis and the others as parasites?”
    A third voice joined the discussion. “With all due respect, these killings are just a distraction from the real problem.”
    “Perhaps, but they reveal something important about the Daemon’s purpose. Bring up the lights, please.”
    Suddenly the room illuminated, revealing the heads of America’s intelligence services sitting around a circular boardroom table in Building OPS-2B of National Security Agency headquarters. Plaques stood in front of everyone present—NSA, CIA, FBI,
    DARPA, DIA—as well as several visitors from the private intelligence and security sectors; suited executives from Computer Systems Corporation (CSC), its subsidiaries—EndoCorp and Korr Military Solutions—and a principal from the lobbying firm Byers, Carroll, and Marquist (BCM).
    Their host scanned the room.
    NSA: “The late Matthew Sobol created his Daemon as a news-reading computer virus. It activated two years ago at the appearance of Sobol’s obituary in online news, and has since spread throughout the world, siphoning capital from corporate hosts to sustain a network of human operatives who distribute and protect it. It has already used these operatives to destroy the data and backup tapes of companies that try to remove it. The question is: how do we kill the Daemon without precipitating a ‘digital doomsday’?”
    DIA: “That’s the dilemma. If we act, the Daemon will react and destroy the corporate networks it’s infected.”
    DARPA: “But we can’t just do nothing . It continues to launch attacks—like it did against the Daemon Task Force at Building Twenty-Nine and these recent assassinations.”
    NSA: “Thousands of people are already dead worldwide—dozens of federal officers are dead. And